Despite my being at
Sokoji for a while, Suzuki-sensei (as we were calling him by 1964) had
never once spoken to me or even looked at me with any acknowledgment
that I was there.

^^^^^^^^

The first time I sat
at Sokoji was sometime in 1962. Phillip Wilson brought me there. I had no
previous knowledge of Zen or Buddhism, other than a photo in a book in our
high school library of a row of monks sitting cross-legged facing a rock
garden, something that had intrigued me very much by its stark serenity. I
was a student at Berkeley, a friend of Phil’s wife J. J., and returned
maybe about 50 times up until I graduated in 1964. From that first foggy
late afternoon up till now, 46 years later, I’ve really appreciated
meditation, though I haven’t set any world records doing it. Before that
first zazen session, I’d tried some formal Christian contemplative prayer,
but the way that zazen included the body, made it part of the process via
breathing and posture, and the non- expectant silence shared with a group
really brought the experience into focus for me. I still remember that
day: the darkish, medium sized meditation room, a few metallic objects
gleaming from the altar, dry tatami, incense and chrysanthemum smells, the
gong, cars whooshing by outside on Bush Street, our chanting from those
soft green cards, syllable for kanji, as we went through a sutra. The
statement “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form,” flickered on the edge of
my understanding like an intense little visual migraine light: now you see
it, now you don’t. The whole experience had unexpected similarities to
religious settings I was familiar with, but some distinct and intriguing
differences as well.

What was it like to
be with the San Francisco group then? Betty Warren’s photos on your site,
two of them in particular, brought a lot of it back for me with a jolt.
The first is the one in the kitchen. The details that grab me are the
small number of people, typical of the time, the humble physical
surroundings (that 50’s refrigerator -- our parents’ kitchens!), the
scroll hanging in the background nevertheless, and Reverend Suzuki’s
posture and expression. I recall him as generally very serious then, more
so than later. My memory is that until his wife came over there weren’t a
lot of smiles, though of course he could always be quizzical and charming
when making an especially Zen point. For me, his watchful expression in
the photo connects with something I realize now and wasn’t aware of then:
the assignment to San Francisco wasn’t a star job in the Soto Zen
firmament, and adding on non-Japanese Americans to the Japanese American
congregation was probably an unusual thing to do. He was clearly very
serious about Buddhism and willing to share its depths with those who were
interested. His face in the picture reminds me of a particular way he
seemed then: not so much a venerated master as a humble priest, exiled to
the provinces and doing his job with more than the required dedication.
Due to my later experiences, there are ways I’m ambivalent about him, but
I really appreciate it that Suzuki as reverend then sensei then roshi
seems to have been one of the very few Zen teachers (or Buddhist priests
or Asian gurus or charismatic leaders of any religion of his era) who
didn’t descend to using his position to get students into bed with him or
to live high on the hog. To me, that says a lot about him.

The other picture of
Betty Warren’s that evokes a lot of emotion in me (more that than specific
memories) is the row of ladies sitting meditating in their white blouses.
Coincidence, I think, those blouses, very 1950’s, which the culture still
was for a few more years. I don’t remember any discussions then of wearing
uniform clothing. Students with Zen titles and in Japanese costume would
have been surprising at that point, at least to me. I think it’s true,
though, that there was a women’s side and a men’s side for meditation.
That wouldn’t have been a big issue in those days, though I imagine
everyone’s probably aware by now that one cultural assumption Reverend
Suzuki didn’t transcend was a tendency (not limited to the Japanese) to
take men more seriously than women, especially as students.

These days it
wouldn’t happen as a matter of course that formidable women like Betty
Warren and Jean Ross would remain handmaidens, and even later, for far too
long, Yvonne Rand would be only the secretary. Young, totally dedicated
and somewhat charismatic men were clearly what Suzuki favored: Dick
beating the drum for his parade with broken hands, Phil Wilson, who
probably would have cut his hand off if Suzuki had asked him to. The
samurai code. That may be why some excellent possible successors such as
Grahame Petchey and Claude Dalenberg got overlooked and Bill Kwong’s
transmission took the confusing course it did. I don’t remember that in
the early 1960s anyone was very concerned with transmission or thought
about whether Suzuki could or would give it to some chosen one of the
group of Americans that had started sitting there. That Pandora’s box
wasn’t open yet. Having as many women students as men probably came as an
unanticipated part of Reverend Suzuki’s openness to our slowly growing
presence, a part he never fully dealt with. So those ladies sitting there
in their white blouses send a complex message to me.

^^^^^^^^^^

I graduated from
Berkeley in 1964 and, thanks to a connection with the Episcopal church I’d
been raised in, found a job teaching English at a prep school in Japan. I
felt very lucky to have found a job in a country that interested me so
much because of the sitting I’d been doing at Sokoji. As you probably
know, Japan wasn’t affluent then; no cars being made yet, still pretty
much the post- Occupation economy for them, so jobs teaching English there
weren’t as easily come by as they were later, and they didn’t pay much. My
school was in Kamakura, one of the old capitals, an exquisite small city
about an hour south of Tokyo. Soon after I arrived, I met Phillip and
Delancey Kapleau, who also lived there. Phillip Kapleau was mildly critical
of my interest in Zen, saying he didn’t think it was the best way for a
really young person such as me to spend her time (a sort of “get a life
first” message, I think). But he did introduce me at Engakuji, a nearby
Rinzai temple where I could sit any day, and at Zuisenji in Kamakura where
an informal Soto Zen group sat about once a month, usually with
Yasutani-roshi. Delancey Kapleau , a meditation adept herself, befriended
me and nobly helped me through some of my problems, complications with a
boyfriend, religious dilemmas, etc. Once, after a day of sitting at
Zuisenji, a man I never saw again came up to me and said, very intently,
in excellent English, that I had just as much right to be there as anyone
else and I should keep coming. I don’t think I fully got then how much
insight, and what unusual initiative, were involved in his doing that. I
hadn’t accepted yet that the right to pursue Zen on equal terms with
anyone else was an issue for me.

I had left San
Francisco without saying good bye or even telling Suzuki where I was
going. Despite my being at Sokoji for a while, Suzuki-sensei (as we were
calling him by 1964) had never once spoken to me or even looked at me with
any acknowledgment that I was there. If I thought about it at the time, it
was only to assume that I just wasn’t worthy. Right before I left, he did
tell J.J. Wilson to tell me to come talk with him about going to Japan. At
that point I’d given up my apartment in Berkeley and was staying with my
parents, who weren’t too happy about the whole going to Japan venture
anyway, and up until the day of my departure made it difficult for me to
get back up to the Bay Area. And by then the thought of talking to Suzuki
made me nervous anyway. I was still young (22), looked about 15, was
extremely shy and pretty obviously depressed. As I know now, thanks to
your biography, David, young females and their psychology (wife 1, wife 2,
emotionally distraught daughter) had not exactly been the comfort zone of
Suzuki’s life up to then, which may have been why he’d avoided me.

Knowing what I do
now about the Japanese in general and Zen masters in particular, I think
that my not going to talk with Suzuki-sensei when asked, put together with
the later coincidence that I ended up spending some time at both Rinsoin
and Eiheiji, neither visit under his aegis, caused some of the oddity of
our relationship later on. Doing things on your own isn’t common in Japan,
neither is not consulting your teacher. I remember that when Grahame and
Pauline Petchey came to Kamakura for a brief visit, I took them to meet
Phillip Kapleau, and he was unexpectedly rude to Grahame, saying something
like, well, why did you come to see me if not to accept me as your
teacher? And that was from an American who didn’t have his own temple
yet, though obviously he was already steeped in some of the Zen mores. I
also remember the students at my school standing up and bowing to me every
time I entered the classroom. I got clued in pretty quickly that I
shouldn’t bow back to them as deeply as they were bowing to me.

^^^^^^^^^^

When Phillip Wilson
came to Japan in 1965, he went first to Suzuki’s family temple of Rinsoin
near Yaizu-shi. The plan was that Suzuki’s son Hoichi would prepare him to
go to Eiheiji and conduct him there. Soon after Phillip arrived I got a
phone call from him. He was having some difficulty making himself
understood, being sure he understood what was going on. So I took the
train down and showed up at the temple. Whatever problem he’d been having
was quickly sorted out (or maybe had been even before I got there. I can’t
remember exactly what it was). Suzuki’s daughter and his mother-in-law
were very kind to me (the daughter and some other family members took me
to the local beach one day). They were pleasant to be around, but Rinsoin
itself was dank and depressing. The zendo seemed to have become a storage
space. No zazen going on that I could see. I didn’t realize until years
later that Hoichi-san was a priest, though I do remember the meticulous
way he shaved Phil’s head and got him suited up in begging monk’s garb to
go to the monastery (that was what I sent you some pictures of, David,
which I’ll try to find for you again).

Holding the fort for
his father at Rinsoin at that time can’t have been an easy assignment for
Hoichi-san. When I arrived at Yaizu-shi and was trying to find a ride out
to the temple, people were curious about what a young female foreigner who
spoke some Japanese was doing there, so I spent a little time talking with
a few of them while the search for someone to drive me out there was
underway. Their advice to me was that Rinsoin maybe wasn’t a good place
for me to go. When I said I had a friend there who needed a little
language help, they dropped the subject and I never did find out what
their reasons were, though I think I can guess them now. After a few days
at Rinsoin I saw Phil and Hoichi-san off at the train station and then
went back to Kamakura myself.

A few months later
Phil called again from Eiheiji. He needed some extra -large size warm
clothes (underwear, socks, sweaters) that I guess weren’t available in
Fukui-shi, so I got him some in Tokyo and took the train to Eiheiji. Much
consternation when I got there. It took them a while to get it that I was
Phillip’s wife’s friend, not some girl friend who was stalking him, and
that he’d asked me to come. They put me in a waiting room with chairs,
where I sat quietly for an hour or so -- I had heard of tangaryo -- till
consensus was reached and they decided to let me stay for a while, putting
me in what they called the Danish lady’s room. I still remember the thick
striped icicles hanging from the eves outside my room like cats’ tails,
the constant, bracing cold, the huge zendo and chanting room. One morning
during the chanting after early zazen I had my transcendent Eiheiji
moment, a sense of the monks’ chanting being part of an unbroken
succession all the way from the time of the Buddha. It didn’t occur to me
until later that the morning hymn singing in the Japanese Episcopalian
prep school where I taught could be seen in a similar way.

As it turned out,
the most important insight I had while at Eiheiji was that with all the
ranks of priests, the robes and other gear, the full folderol of rites and
ceremonies, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism included, was just as much a religion
as the Episcopal stuff I was used to, with the same complement of
hierarchical politics and personality clashes attached. I also learned
from talking with some of the young monks that many of them were at
Eiheiji mainly because they had to be. They were the designated heirs of
their family temples and had to do the training to inherit them. Not so
different from Jane Austen’s brothers. Some of the monks there probably
had profound connections with Buddhism, but not all, and few seemed to
take it with the killing seriousness that Phil and other Americans who
tried the full training there did. I think many of the young Japanese
monks understood it as a kind of Japanese manhood test, like getting
through Marine training for an American. In a way, that might have made it
easier for them.

^^^^^^^^^

When I came back
from Japan in 1967, after three years in Japan and after meeting his
family, etc., etc., Suzuki -- roshi by then -- accepted with no expression
the present I brought him and instantly turned his attention to the next
person in line. I knew enough by then to realize that that was the
Japanese equivalent of an American going off on you. What I didn’t begin
to get then was why he would be reacting to me that way. It seemed
surprising and cold and rude, not at all natural, and looking back on it I
still think it was, despite the fact that by now I can get my mind around
the possibility that he thought I’d been rude to him, not a properly
deferential student. It’s also occurred to me that he might have been
afraid I’d heard from his family and from other people in Japan who knew
more about him than he was comfortable with our knowing. (I hadn’t. Not a
whisper.) At that time, living in San Francisco as I was, and busy
digesting the experience of living in Japan, I thought of myself as still
connected with Zen and with him. I kept coming to sit for the next three
years, went down to Tassajara as a student worker quite a few times, and
even lived in the housing across from Sokoji for a while. But Suzuki Roshi
and I never once spoke. Seems pretty bizarre now, an eight year student-
teacher relationship in which the two parties never speak to each other,
but at the time I just repressed that it was happening. It was confusing
and disappointing, and I needed (and need) to think that total spiritual
worthlessness on my part couldn’t account for it. After all, I was a
sentient being, and there we were at Tassajara taking a vow to save them
all, ourselves included. It’s true, though, I wasn’t an ideal Zen student.
I was going to graduate school, working, had my own apartment, had other
friends and activities, and didn't even dress or act in the style of the
ZenCenter culture that was evolving at that
time. I had also let it be known that I had thought the Japanese costumes
and names were unnecessary and silly, potentially self-deceiving.

I wonder if other
people like me had similar experiences there. There are certainly many
good people who came and went, as well as ones who stayed. There are a lot
whose names I don’t remember, but I do remember particularly John Steiner
who, despite the Zen Center’s emerging code of hip non-responsiveness to
other people’s personal problems (like Zen students weren't supposed to
have those), brought me a cup of water as I was coming down with the Asian
flu near the end of the 1968 -69 new year’s session at Tassajara -- best
drink of anything I've had in my life.

I also remember a
painter named Jane, who (I think this is her story and not someone else’s)
had gotten very stressed out in the Peace Corps in Indonesia and insisted
on giving me two of her paintings, saying she was done with painting. I
think she had put them out in the hallway to throw them away. (They’re
wonderful paintings; I've kept them. I wish Jane could e-mail me and get
them back even though I won’t like parting with them). Other people who
stand out for me in memory as kind, intelligent, substantial people who
kept their own balance in the midst of all our rapid and exciting
sub-culture growth, are Louise Welch, Peter Schneider, Jim and Rick Morton
and Rick’s wife Carolyn, and Deborah Madison, who deserves every bit of
her success; I've learned a lot from her recipes. There were other people
I had a harder time getting along with (and I’m sure some who didn't like
me). The guy who insisted on feeding only brown rice to “our” cats who
lived under the Bush street house I stayed in was one (I fed them cat food
anyway), and a couple of others who disapproved of my working but touched
me up for loans. The sub-culture at its most cultish -- pretty mild at
that point -- was such that, when I got offered a job at Cal Arts in Los
Angeles after finishing graduate school, some fellow students pointed out
to me that a serious Buddhist wouldn't take it. I'll always thank
Katagiri-sensei (I could speak with him) for saying to me when I asked him
about it, something on the order of “Why are you even asking? Of course
you should take the job! There’s a Zen Center
in Los Angeles.” Again, without
saying goodbye to Suzuki, reverend, sensei, roshi, whatever he was to me
by then, I left San Francisco and have been here ever since. I didn't keep
up the Zen involvement, which is not to say I stopped sitting . At various
difficult points in my life since then, either doing it or just
remembering it, tuning into its mind set, has hugely helped me out, and
it’s great to do on good days too.

^^^^^^^^^

One closing chunk I
want to add, though it’s not a memory and may be disagreeable to people
heavily involved with Zen. I have a serious problem with Zen discourse,
the Zen way of talking. (Not yours, David, but what I call roshi talk, or,
if I’m feeling edgy, roshi prattle.) It began in those last three years in
San Francisco and continues to this day. I think that the Zen way of
speaking, even as Suzuki does it in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, is too
often coy, evasive and manipulative. I remember that before the book came
out we used to shake our heads over his speeches at Sokoji, openly
admitting we didn't understand a lot of them, could never get hold of
their structures, and that all that was probably due to his lack of
command of English. Looking back on it all, though, I think his English
was actually pretty good, and he was saying things the way he wanted to.
Keeping people from fully understanding you can be useful (we've all heard
the skillful means argument), and our Santa Claus was collecting a pretty
wild reindeer herd of young Americans. Who knew that a lot of people would
turn his book into their functional equivalent of Mao’s little red book?

Here’s my problem. I
can’t go along with the hagiography of, “Ah, I asked roshi a question and
he pointed at a fly on the ceiling. What a sublime comment!” That kind of
stuff, minimalist mirroring language, or language reduced to gesture that
throws the burden of making sense onto whoever receives it is a style of
discourse that seems to me to lead straight into “the emperor’s new
clothes” land. And I’m not tone deaf to poetry. To me a lot of
contemporary Zen talk isn't poetry at all. It seldom has poetry’s
freshness. It’s not fully an attempt to find the image and language
equivalent of a feeling state. Too often it is (or was by the time I left
ZenCenter) stale and imitative, people going
around trying to talk like Suzuki Roshi. It’s a way of speaking that
implies that if you don’t agree with what’s said, or at least pretend to
enjoy it, it’s because you don’t understand it.

The deliberate
obscurity of Zen talk and the skillful means rationale for it aside, some
of the things Suzuki Roshi said were straightforward enough, and, without
being a boneheaded super rationalist, I didn't always agree with them. For
example, his advice on how we should deal with the prolonged
demonstrations going on then at San Francisco State
in an effort to establish a black studies program. For several months in
late 1968 that was a huge event and controversy in San Francisco, lots of
upsetting violence, headline story in The Chronicle every day. At one of
his talks, Suzuki Roshi told us we should learn from how the Japanese
dealt with conflicts between people by avoiding merging, keeping the
different foods on separate plates. After enduring three years of Japanese
culture’s hypersensitivity to the foreignness of foreigners, their almost
always keeping the gaijin (and Koreans and burakumin) on separate plates,
I thought what he was saying was an unintentional variant of the separate
but equal doctrine that had done so much harm in our country. I mean,
there on campus the delighted press and police (brought in for
“protection” but busy arresting students when not just thwacking us with
their batons), and there at my wisdom pit, the place I hoped to get
perspective on things, my Zen master, really not getting it that a long
overdue change in American culture was working itself out -- messy at it
was, then and for a long time after. As Suzuki Roshi was giving that
speech, I decided that if I questioned him he wouldn't actually consider
the possibility he could be wrong. I thought he’d probably just make a
joke of any question raised about what he’d said -- ever seen that happen
in a zendo? --and that the rest of his audience would have thrilled to the
joke.

Even if I was
somehow wrong about that incident, having a situation where anything the
teacher says or does is true and right, no matter what, prevents a good
discourse community. I think the way people had come to use language with
each other in the San Francisco Zen Center around the time I left in 1970,
and continued to use it at least through the Baker years, had a lot to do
with the sordid socio-political situation that played itself out there --
and to the community’s credit got resolved. I can see that what I call Zen
discourse still goes on somewhat. I also appreciate it that discussions
are potentially more open now. I wouldn't be writing this if they weren't
. Many thanks, David, for pursuing facts at the cost of communal legends
in your biography, and to other people who've said what they think in
interviews on your and other websites, even at the risk of a community not
agreeing with them. I’m weirdly private and don’t really like writing
about myself. But your and other people’s openness have made it easier for
me to do it here, in the hope that one or another of the things I've
recalled may shed some light on their own experiences for others who were
or are involved in the Zen community, in San Francisco.